★★★ #1 racing game in 76 countries ! ★★★

★★★★★ From RedLynx, creators of ★★★★★ DrawRace 2 and Trials HD! ...

If you’re familiar with recent games in the Trials series, then you know that developer RedLynx has serious design chops when it comes to making ultra-challenging stunt racing games. On the surface, MotoHeroz for iOS looks like an attempt at a more casual take on the genre, one where average joes won’t have to go bonkers trying to shave milliseconds off their run times. This is not the case at all. MotoHeroz is hardcore, and it’ll drive you crazy– but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

MotoHeroz looks very welcoming. It has a light, cartoonish vibe that comes from the gorgeously detailed environments, bouncy animations, and stylized vehicle designs. The controls are about as basic as they come: you can move left, right, tilt, and that’s it. And like a kid-friendly platformer, there’s plenty to collect in each level, from coins and power-ups to extremely valuable treasure chests.

It’s a guh-guh-guh-ghost!

However, once you start playing MotoHeroz, you’ll realize it has teeth and it’s not afraid to bite. The game is divided into six worlds, with five levels in each. Unlocking levels requires stars, which you earn by achieving goals in previous levels. Usually the goal is to achieve a finish time so speedy that it seems nearly impossible at first, but some levels mix it up a little. Anyway, by about halfway through, the difficulty reaches fairly severe levels. This is where you might start pounding your head against the wall.

To make the challenge a little more reasonable, they let you upgrade your vehicles. The game comes with six off-road automobiles that can only be used on their respective levels. Each one has three stats you can increase: speed, acceleration, and item boost. Upgrading your ride costs coins, which are earned for doing well in the levels. So the better you play, the better you can make your vehicles, which ideally leads to earning more stars. This is 2012, so you can buy coins or fully spec out your vehicles through in-app purchase. Any time you try to buy an upgrade you can’t afford, the in-app purchase screen pops up, which we found a little aggravating.

Night rider.

And while the controls certainly aren’t bad, they require a lot of nuance. As you play and re-play through each level, you’ll find sticky spots in the terrain that you have to anticipate if you want to have a prayer of finishing in time to get an extra star. You’ll have to replay levels often, because unlocking new levels requires a lot of stars. For a game that offers such a colorful, chaotic experience, it seems strange that they’ve roped off later levels this way.

Don’t let the cutesy graphics fool you: MotoHeroz is not a casual-friendly game. That said, serious gamers will get a lot of replay value out of it, and a lot of that particular kind of satisfaction that comes from beating a level you once thought unbeatable. Thirty fairly short levels might not sound like much content, but you’ll often have to play through them several dozen times before you rack up three stars and nab the treasure chest. There’s a ton to do here, and you’ll love it if you can handle the grind.

When it comes to deals, is there a better videogame market than the App Store? We don’t think so. If you haven’t done so yet, you’ll probably want to download Flick Kick Football and MotoHeroz, because they’re both good games, and they’re both free today.

The sport in Flick Kick Football is actually soccer, but don’t let that scare you away even if you don’t care much for the low-scoring, hyper-popular sport. Succeeding in this game is less about footwork and more about finger control. You flick your finger across the screen, and the soccer ball goes flying. Master the nuances, and you’ll go far, young padawan. Read our full review and download the game here.

MotoHeroz was made by the talented folks behind the Trials series on Xbox Live Arcade. It’s a similar game, too, which means you’ll have to traverse crazy obstacle courses without breaking your neck. It’s no cakewalk, though, so brace yourself for a challenge. If you can handle it, read our full review and download the game here.

We had a lot of great things to say about MotoHeroz when it launched last week, which isn’t surprising, seeing as it comes from the same studio that made games as diverse and well-received as 1000 Heroz and the DrawRace series. We caught up with Pekka Kupiainen, the head of the mobile division at RedLynx Games, to see what they have in store for iOS gamers in the future.

STP: How did you personally get into making video games?

Pekka: Originally, like many others in the games industry, I was a huge gaming fan. I went to school and did my masters on the business and IT side, and ended up working as a producer for Nokia during the N-Gage times. Back then, RedLynx was huge on mobile, and I worked with them on some projects. After a few years, RedLynx asked if I wanted to work for them, and it was an offer I wasn’t able to refuse. So I joined RedLynx one year ago as a producer, and after a couple of projects, I’m now heading their mobile division, and still doing some production. We’re a small company, so we kind of have mixed roles.

How many employees does RedLynx have right now?

We have around 50 people working for the company.

What was the first iOS game you worked on for RedLynx?

The first one that was released was MotoHeroz. I have a couple of projects still cooking up, and I also participated on 1000 Heroz, but not in the role of producer.

1000 Heroz is a unique iOS game. It’s a side-scrolling platformer, and you promised to release a new level every day. Are you still doing that?

Yeah, of course. The game still has quite a solid player base, and it’s a unique experience. We’re not the kind of company that always makes safe bets all the time– we want to test out new things. With 1000 Heroz, we think it’s a great game, and we’d love to have more players.

Did you have anything to do with the DrawRace series?

I wasn’t working on that series from scratch, but we’re a small company and I sit next to the executive producer of DrawRace. We have talks daily about what to do with the game. Of course we’re doing updates all the time and keeping the game fresh. So I’m kind of a part of that.

MotoHeroz originally came out on Wii. What made you think it would work well on iPhone and iPad?

It kind of has a more casual feel than our most well-known physics-based games, Trials. It has solid gameplay and the controls are such that we thought it would fit perfectly on iOS. The game also has asynchronous multiplayer, which we saw would fit perfectly with iOS.

Trials is known for having a very high level of difficulty, but even though MotoHeroz is a similar kind of game, it has a more casual look to it. How did you find the right amount of difficulty for MotoHeroz?

We bounced it around quite a bit. To be honest, the game is quite challenging. We tried out different difficulty levels, and saw that the pleasure and feeling of achievement comes from when you’re beating the most opponents. For the next update, we’re going to make a small adjustment to make the game a little more approachable for first-timers. But we still want to have a really deep gaming experience which is easy to get into, but you can always do a little better and get a faster time.

Personally, I found it a lot more challenging than I was expecting. By world three, I had to go back and replay levels to get more stars to progress ahead.

That’s the ideology behind the game. We want the levels to be perfect, and for people to be able to play them many times over again. We didn’t want 100 levels that weren’t that polished– instead, we wanted 30 that were perfect. That’s why the learning curve is such that you need to go back, and we think it’s a good experience when you learn from the game.

What other updates are you thinking about or working on for MotoHeroz?

The main thing in the next update, which is coming in about two weeks, is that there will be more Friends Cups. We have this Friends League feature in the game that lets you race against your friends, so we’ll have support for three different Friends Leagues. Also, we’ll add a new track pack.

What are you working on next for iOS?

We have lots of things that we’re planning on, but nothing that I can share at the moment. But we have interesting plans, and of course we have several updates planned for MotoHeroz. We’ve seen from reviews that people are loving our game, and we’re going to support it.

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